A short story by Maxwell Conroe inspired by Tolstoy's Hadji Murad, highlighting the tragedy of soldiers in a steel plant and the inevitability of human suffering, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.

Maxwell shares a story where Tolstoy's war-memories of Hadji Murad are updated to highlight the tragedy of dying soldiers in the Hell of Mariupol's steel plant. War struggles never cease to create men tough as thistles. Tolstoy’s description of the thistle, which opens his story, is the tangible object of our suffering as men in life; ending with us sagging in quicksand or sticky mud that reclaims our ashes: ashes-to-ashes is what life is all about — nothing less, nothing more.